Yes, it was just a dream. But knowing this doesn’t stop you from tapping your teeth to make sure they are all there, and throughout the day whenever you glance in the mirror you can’t help but feel reassured to see your teeth intact. The dream felt so real. What did it mean? Should you visit your dentist? No, your teeth are in great shape because you visited your dentist a month ago after having the same dream. So, why are you having this dream yet again?

Teeth falling out is one of the most common dreams people have, so there has to be some kind of meaning to it. The great majority of dreams are as unique as the person who dreams them but certain dreams come up time and time again. Here are nine of the most common dreams we have and the psychological reasoning behind them.

9 Common Dreams and Their Meanings

1. Naked

In this extremely common dream, you are with a group of people and suddenly you realise you are the only person who is not wearing anything. You are completely naked. This dream suggests that you are feeling exposed and vulnerable in your waking life; you need to protect yourself. A flip side interpretation is that your subconscious is urging you towards greater self-expression or the freedom to be more honest in your relationships.

2. Losing Teeth

Teeth are a symbol of dominance and power in the animal kingdom, so this dream could suggest low self-esteem or confidence. You have lost your mojo and your dreaming mind wants you to enjoy being you again. Alternatively, as loss of baby teeth is a sign of growing up, this dream could also suggest fear of ageing or the need to let go of the past in some way to move forward.

3. Taking an Examination

Chances are you have had a dream where you are about to take a test or examination or are actually taking it. The simplest explanation is that you are stressed out with your work or studies, but it could also indicate that you need to keep on top of things and stay alert. You could be missing things out and not paying enough attention to important details.

4. Flying

This exhilarating dream occurs when you are quite literally feeling high—with joy. Your dreaming mind wants you to savour the moment while it lasts. If, however, your waking life is anything but joyful then flying dreams are urging you to detach from your problems, spread metaphorical wings and let go of self-imposed limitations so you can see the bigger picture.

5. Falling

Dreaming of falling from a great height suggests you are frightened of failing or are feeling insecure and unsupported in some way. Your dreaming mind is urging you to deal with the issues that are overwhelming you. Closely associated with falling is the dream of drowning. Drowning also suggests a sense of crisis or feeling overwhelmed; an indication that you are metaphorically drowned by the circumstances in your waking life.

6. Running away or being  chased

Either you are feeling threatened in some way in your waking life, or your dreaming mind is trying to get you to face an issue or problem that has been holding you back. Dreams of being lost have a fairly similar meaning in that they also suggest you are feeling confused and aren’t sure which way to turn in your waking life. Your subconscious wants you to find a direction, a solution.

7. Death

More a nightmare, many people worry that dreams of themselves or their loved ones dying may come true in real life. Rest assured this is not the case as dreams are symbolic and do not predict the future. If someone you know in a dream dies, or is dead, this means that the part of yourself or the situation that person represents is dead, or needs to die. If you are the dying person, your dreaming mind is urging you to make changes, let go of old ways or one stage in your life and take a new path. So this is very much an “out with the old, in with the new” dream interpretation.

8. Arriving late and car out of control!

Your dreaming mind is telling you that you are unprepared or have taken on way too much. Another closely related dream is when you dream about transport difficulties or are in a vehicle that suddenly loses control. You may be the driver or the passenger but either way it is a sign that you are feeling powerless and a crash is likely if urgent changes in your waking life aren’t made soon or a bad habit isn’t corrected or brought under control. Dreams about phones or electrical appliances being faulty have a similar meaning. You need to reassess your life, take on less and focus on what really matters.

9. Sex

Typically we have sex in our dreams with people who are not our partners, or dream of our partners having sex with other people but this does not mean you are going to have an affair or that your partner is cheating. If you are having sex in your dreams—especially with someone you aren’t attracted to in real life—your subconscious is urging you to develop aspects of yourself that are hidden. What aspect of yourself does the person you have sex with in your dream represent? For example, if you dream of a celebrity, perhaps this suggests the desire for more recognition or confidence. And if you dream of your partner cheating, don’t judge or jump to conclusions. It could simply mean that your partner is devoting too much attention to something other than you: work, study, sports, a hobby, a pet and so on. It could also indicate that you are drifting apart and need to reconnect.

Amazing you

Your dreams do not predict the future or read your mind but what they can do is shine a symbolic spotlight on an area of your personality or your life that you need to resolve, develop or pay more attention to. If you listen to what your inner therapist is trying to say, you will find that every dream you have has a great deal to say about you and your life—because in your dreams absolutely everything is about YOU.

The post What Is the Meaning Behind These 9 Common Dreams appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Many instructors offer this as a tool at the beginning of the class, often along with a poem, a quote, a story, or a suggestion for what your intention could be. But no one ever really talks about what an intention actually is.

The Purpose of Intention

Considering we’re still in January, it is a good time to revisit the purpose of setting intentions. Back in 2015, I ran a 21-day healthy habit building challenge that talked about the importance of setting intentions. It’s a great introductory post to setting intentions, but here I’m going to dive deeper.

An intention can guide you back to the present moment. Intentions are not goals. You can achieve a goal but intentions are embodied and integrated in all the layers of your Self. Intentions can be adapted because it’s not about the outcome but how you show up in your action.

How to Set an Intention

The first step towards setting an intention is to get quiet and still. Take a deep breath, do some simple movements to release stored energy in the body and take a few moments to listen deeply to what your body, mind, and senses are trying to tell you.

Ask yourself what you most need. Watch to see if an answer seems to appear spontaneously without you having to analyze too much.

If nothing comes, ask yourself why you showed up on your yoga mat in the first place. Is there something you’ve been searching for?

Try to boil your intention down to one word or one short phrase that is easy to remember. Peace, Love, Quiet, Truth, Breath, Strength, etc. are all great examples. Feeling words tend to be easier for the mind to comprehend.

How to use your intentions throughout class

When you set an intention at the beginning of an asana class, you are choosing to focus on a particular way of being. If you find yourself feeling other than how you wish to be, then your intention can help you customize a yoga posture to fit your needs.

It’s common to set an intention at the beginning of class and then not even remember what it was by the end. If this is the case, the intention you chose is probably not that meaningful to you.

Throughout class, during every posture, every breath, every transition, you can ask yourself if you are embodying your word or phrase.

This is the part that tricked up one of my students. He was trying to reconcile setting an intention for say, peace, and then trying to push himself into and through difficult postures. My suggestion to him was to customize the posture so to help him achieve more peace, but that way of thinking was almost foreign to him. That’s because, it’s more common to hear suggestions such as “push to your edge,” “take one more breath,” or “do XYZ so that you don’t tear your muscles, ligaments, tendons,” etc. While that language does have it’s place in certain circumstances, the beauty of a group yoga class is that everyone can be doing the same physical posture but with a different intention. If one person’s intention is strength, their individual expression will be quite different from the person who’s intention is peace. And that is okay! This is how intention guides your personal practice. This is how you know when it’s okay to go a little further and when it’s time to back off.

A Word on Sankalpa

There is a Sanskrit word called sankalpa that often gets translated as intention. If you set an intention at the beginning of every class, that intention naturally adapts to your changing needs. Sankalpa, on the other hand, is a larger intention you wish to live your life by. Values such as peace, love and strength are good intentions but, on any given day, you might not feel strong, for example. Sometimes, we need to feel supported too.

That is why setting a Sankalpa is important. It is an exercise in understanding our deepest values and desires. It is a vow that we are determined to keep not because we are trying to change something about ourselves but because we need to be reminded every once in a while about our deepest held beliefs and desires and the importance of aligning with them.

A Sankalpa is often more than one word or phrase, but a short sentence — a declaration. Our Sankalpa is beyond the ego and mind. It comes from the heart.

Sankalpas can change over time too. The lifespan of a Sankalpa is best measured on the scale of months and years unlike intention that are usually meant for a few days to a few weeks at the most.

As you practice setting intentions, notice if any patterns arise. Are there intentions that keep popping up over and over again? If so, consider spending some time reflecting on your beliefs and desires and crafting a Sankalpa that you can take with you into every practice. It is possible to have both a Sankalpa, a mantra of sorts, and an intention that changes day-to-day.

Good luck setting your intentions! Remember, it’s called yoga ‘practice’ not yoga perfect.

This blog has been adapted from the original, which appears on the author’s website.

The post How Intentions and Sankalpa Strengthen Your Yoga Practice appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Dreams contain inspiration, warnings, and prophesy about your future. In his book The Toltec Secret: Dreaming Practices of the Ancient Mexicans, Sergio Magaña, who comes from this 1,400-year-old lineage, points out that there are two different realities: the naqual (where dreams come from) and the tonal (waking life). He says that the naqual is four times more important than the tonal because everything that happens to us in waking life was first shown to us in a dream.

That doesn’t mean that what you experience in a dream will inevitably come to pass in waking life. The main thing is to get the message so you can change the outcome when possible. You can even work to make this change in the naqual by reentering your dream and changing the ending. Magaña says that those who don’t pay attention to their dreams are like the walking dead. I’ve come to see the wisdom of that statement.

Sigmund Freud and his student Carl Jung—both fathers of modern psychology—knew and wrote about the power of dreams as Soul communication. Those who train at the Jung Institute in Switzerland are trained extensively in dream analysis. Marion Woodman, the prolific writer and psychoanalyst, worked with and wrote about the astounding power of dream imagery to help and heal. Her books are classics.

Don’t take your dreams lightly

One of my doctor friends told me about an experience he had that made him reconsider the power of dreams. He had a vivid dream that he was bleeding to death from his rectum. He went in for testing and, sure enough, they found a very small colon cancer. It was removed and he’s been fine ever since. He credits the dream with saving his life. Dr. Larry Burk, a radiologist and the author of Let Magic Happen, has done extensive research on dreams and has published a study on dreams of breast cancer as a reliable diagnostic tool. Dreams can be so helpful and accurate; you have to wonder why the medical profession ignores them!

I began an in-depth study of my own dreams with clinical psychologist Doris E. Cohen, author of Repetition: Past Lives, Life, and Rebirth, back in 2012 when my ego was being shredded by the loss of a man I truly loved. Doris taught me that the subconscious mind is very efficient, and it will use whatever is currently going on in your life to make a point. That’s likely to include imagery from a recently watched TV show or movie. That does not mean that the TV show caused you to dream what you’re dreaming. Your subconscious is just using that character to make a point. For example, I dreamed about the character Jake on Scandal once. What he represented was loyalty, integrity, and skill—the very things I like in a man. I was not dreaming about Jake, per se. I think one of the reasons celebrities are so adored in our society is because they enact roles for the entire collective and we project onto them. In this, they do our psyches a big service.

Without the dreams and my work with Doris as a lifeline, I might have slipped into despair and bitterness. Instead, I worked through my pain and wrote Goddesses Never Age—a title that was given to me by Doris during one of our dream work sessions. And this book has inspired and uplifted thousands of women all over the world. All because I followed the dictates of my own Soul—and was willing to transform my own pain.

How to work with, remember, and interpret your dreams

1. Set your intention to remember your dreams. Just say out loud or to yourself something like “Divine Beloved, please help me to relax and remember my dreams tonight.” Have a pen, paper, flashlight, or recording device right on your bedside table.
2. Ask a question that you would like to have answered in your dream. Ask that the imagery be easy to understand and interpret. Then let go of it all and drift into sleep.
3. If a dream awakens you in the middle of the night, it likely has an important message. So make sure you at least jot down a few details to remember it in the morning. In your sleepy state between the world of waking and sleeping, when the dream is very vivid, you’ll be certain you could never forget the details. You will if you don’t write down at least a few things about it. Trust me on this one. It’s happened to me dozens of times.
4. As soon as you awaken, lie in bed for a moment, remembering the details of the dream before they slip away. Write them down. I personally dictate them into my iPhone as voice memos. Later I write them up in Word documents and put them into monthly files that I keep on my computer.
5. Give the dream a title—like a headline in a newspaper. This will encapsulate the wisdom in the dream and, in the future, will often bring the entire dream back to you in vivid detail.
6. Check for recurrent themes in your dreams. And also any animals. I love it when animals show up in my dreams. They are always highly symbolic. I always look up the symbol the next day. Animal Speak by Ted Andrews is my favorite book for this. Also Medicine Cards by Jamie Sams and David Carson. You can also Google the name of the animal and the word meaning, e.g., “gorilla meaning.”
7. Other common and useful symbols and themes include clothing and shoes, which represent the roles you play in life. The hair on your head represents the thoughts in your head, so a new hair color or hairstyle indicates a new way of thinking. Cars represent the Self moving through life. Houses are also the Self—and the basement is the unconscious. When you find new rooms you didn’t know were there, it means you are opening up to new aspects of your Self.
8. Larry Burk suggests that you ask yourself, “What does the dream want?” Stop and listen for the first thought that comes into your head. Write it down. He says to seriously consider that the spirit world may have a question it wants you to answer in return.
9. Share the dream with someone. Very often, recounting the dream out loud with a trusted friend or therapist will illuminate the meaning very quickly simply through the process of sharing.

Note how often you will remember a dream you had the night before—but much later in the day—like the afternoon.

See if you can determine what jogged your memory enough to remember the dream then. Write it down. Don’t dismiss it. Doris, my dream therapist, tells me that we usually dream the same kinds of things hundreds of times before we get the message. That is how compassionate our Souls are!

If a dream brings up an unresolved issue or bothers you in some way, you can, in waking life, simply close your eyes and re-enter the dream. Change the ending. Remember—this is a freewill universe. We can change our future by changing our present. And whether the imagery comes in a dream or in a meditation, it’s all coming from the same place.

The post Dreams are potent indicators; don’t take them lightly appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

Wallenda’s feat—one of his seven world records—made us think about the purpose of the safety nets we so routinely seek in our everyday lives. Are they coaxing us forward, offering us the protection we need, or holding us back? So we asked Wallenda, a 37-year-old father of three, for his take on safety nets, and he graciously shared with us the wisdom gleaned from a legendary seven-generation family of high-wire artists. “Our minds are extremely powerful,” he told us. “You can learn to control what comes in, and filter out the negative. Fear is negative. You can either be overtaken by it, or you can overcome it.”

Performing without a safety net, to Wallenda, is more of an assertion that he is in control than a scary reminder of what could happen should he lose it. It’s not that he has a false sense of security, or a cavalier attitude toward risk. But we found that what Wallenda does applies just as much to those of us who prefer to view the Grand Canyon by tour bus—a grit mindset that can help us conquer the comparatively mundane risks each of us face in our lives. It comes down to becoming, in essence, your own first responder: identifying worst-case scenarios ahead of time, then training yourself what to do if and when they occur. Should that moment arrive, you will have the training—and the confidence—to calmly respond, rather than hastily react. This is where guts, resilience, initiative and tenacity truly payoff.

All it takes is mindfulness—an ability to zoom in on the problem at hand.

“Some are born with grit, and it comes easier,” Wallenda allowed. But, he went on, “we are all growing, all the time. You can gain more and more of it, or you can also lose it if you don’t practise it. Scary is not in my vocabulary. Fear is really just a deep respect. I clearly remember the first time I grasped this: I was six or seven years old and sitting on my father’s shoulders while he was riding a bicycle across the wire. I had been around wild animals in the circus all my life—elephants, tigers, chimpanzees—but I was never afraid of them. I was raised to respect them, knowing they could kill me. On top of my father’s shoulders that day, even though I knew it was something my dad could do in his sleep, I still felt this jolt. I understood that I could either sit there and shake and tremble, or tell myself to be calm and collected. I chose not to be scared. I realised that I’m in control of my mind—my mind is not in control of me.”

Although performing on the high wire has long since become second nature to Wallenda, he continues to respect what could hurt him. That keen awareness and respect, in turn, has taught him to prepare for the worst so he can do his best. He and his team spent five years studying terrain and conditions in the Grand Canyon before undertaking the stunt described at the beginning of the article. While there was no way to predict how much fine desert dust might settle on his two-inch-wide cable the day of his walk, or how powerful the upward drafts of hot air from the canyon floor might get. Wallenda prepared himself for those conditions and rehearsed manoeuvres he could do in response. Before the Grand Canyon walk, he practised for hours every day in his Florida backyard, using wind machines to create 91-mph gusts—stronger than any ever recorded in the canyon itself.

When Tropical Storm Andrea slammed ashore in Florida a week before Wallenda’s historic walk, he seized the opportunity to experience the unpredictability of the fierce storm by practising on a 35-foot high wire in the wind and rain. When the momentous day came and Wallenda found himself making his way across the gorge and feeling the wire bounce beneath his slippered feet, he reminded himself: You trained for 90-miles-per-hour winds, even though they never get above 60 here. You prepared for this; you know what to do. As he neared the other side, Wallenda broke into a sprint, and nimbly leapt back onto solid ground, before going home to ponder what challenge to take on next.

When confidence becomes a muscle memory, panic is replaced by peak performance.

Don’t fear disasters, plan for them

Flight attendants are trained to evacuate a jumbo jet filled with passengers in 90 seconds or less [in the United States, it’s a federal requirement]. Airlines and training academies drill trainees over and over again using realistic mock cabins and simulated emergencies, such as a crash or fire.

Lee Yoon-Hye put her training to the test on 6th July 2013, when Asiana Flight 214 hit a seawall on approach to San Francisco International Airport, broke apart, then cartwheeled down the runway and burst into flames when the jet’s fuel ignited. You might remember seeing news images of Lee: the petite 40-year-old cabin manager from Seoul, South Korea, could be spotted carrying passengers to safety on her back. What you didn’t see was the phenomenal grit she displayed inside the Boeing 777 cabin, where an emergency slide had deployed within the wreckage, trapping terrified passengers. Lee grabbed an axe so that a co-pilot could puncture the slide. Seeing flames erupting in the back, she tossed a fire extinguisher to another crew member as she began herding passengers to safety. All but three of the 307 people aboard the plane survived. And not surprisingly, Lee was the last one off. The San Francisco fire chief hailed her as a hero; doctors later discovered Lee had been assisting the evacuation with a fractured tailbone.

“We followed our training,” she modestly told reporters afterward. “I wasn’t really thinking, but my body just started carrying out the steps needed for an evacuation.”

The fear and trepidation most of us face in our daily lives falls far short of having to save trapped passengers in a burning plane or potentially free-falling to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Yet we routinely rig our lives with the kinds of safety nets that would suggest otherwise. If you wait to act in a situation until it’s risk-free before venturing a toe out onto your own proverbial high wire, what you’re really risking is a lifetime frozen at the starting line.

A woman creates a multimillion-dollar business she started online in her dorm room, while her ex-boyfriend shows up at the class reunion with a job he hates and vague proclamations about waiting to get all of his ducks in a row. Sound familiar? Perhaps you fantasise about taking salsa lessons but refuse to sign up until you lose 12 kilos because you want to look good. Or you’re heartsick over your town’s plans to level a small old-growth forest for a strip mall, but can’t summon the time, energy, and political savvy to fight it. Rolling over is a lot less painful than falling on one’s face.

Too often, our typical default setting is to fear disaster, rather than actually plan for it. And that, Nik Wallenda tells us, is the true catastrophe.

“It’s easier to settle for what’s comfortable than to push on and excel,” he explains. Too often, we live life avoiding what we fear, a hundred times a day. And what we fear often comes down to failure or rejection.

If you wait to act in a situation until it’s risk-free before venturing a toe out onto your own proverbial high wire, what you’re really risking is a lifetime frozen at the starting line

Get rejected

When hypnotist Jason Comely invented an online game called Rejection Therapy a few years ago, one of his stated objectives was to teach people “to be more aware of how irrational social fears control and restrict our lives.”

The game had only one rule: You must be rejected by someone every single day. In fact, rejection equalled success in the game. If your target didn’t reject you, and instead granted your request, it counted as a failure because you evidently didn’t ask for enough.

Chinese immigrant Jia Jiang came across the challenge after quitting his tech job in Austin, Texas, to devote six months to pursuing the dream he had hungered for ever since Bill Gates had spoken to his high school in Beijing: to become an entrepreneur. Four months into his six-month sabbatical, though, Jiang looked down at his vibrating phone in a restaurant to see a devastating text message from the major investor he thought he had on the hook to finance his start-up: No, was all it said. Jiang excused himself to go outside and cry.

“My choices were rejection or regret, and both stunk,” Jiang recalled in a TEDx talk that has since made him a YouTube sensation. Jiang considered cutting his losses and going back to a “real” job two months early. “But in the end, I chose rejection and kept going, and the world was never the same again.”

Intrigued by Comely’s game, Jiang decided to desensitise himself to the pain of rejection by challenging himself to endure one hundred days of rejection, and record it on a hidden camera for his video blog. He immediately began racking up points. Costco refused to let him talk to its customers over the store intercom. A stranger declined to loan him a hundred bucks. FedEx wouldn’t send a box to Santa at the North Pole. “But then a funny thing happened,” Jiang reported. “I started getting yeses.” He knocked on a stranger’s door and was granted permission to play soccer in the family’s backyard. A guard let him dance Gangnam-style on the building’s security camera.

Then there was the time Jiang walked into a random company and asked to speak to the CEO. “Why?” the receptionist wanted to know.

“Because I’m going to challenge him to a staring contest,” came the reply. And he was invited in to see the CEO.

[The CEO turned out to be a her, and she won.]

Rejection, Jiang discovered, had turned him into “a better communicator, a better negotiator.” And the customary sting he had experienced upon being rejected had been replaced by a feeling of liberation that he found exhilarating, pushing him to take ever-greater risks.

When Jiang strolled into a Krispy Kreme shop to request doughnuts customised to resemble the Olympics logo, an obliging employee said she’d see what she could do, then returned shortly to proudly display her creation—a box of five-interlocked doughnut rings in the Olympic colours. “It’s on me, get out,” she said with a grin when Jiang asked what he owed. Jiang’s hidden-camera video of that encounter drew so many viewers on YouTube that the media took note, and the rejected Jiang became a star.

His experiment, Jiang told his TED audience, “taught me to see rejection eye to eye and remain calm, and see it as what it is. It’s not this monster bag of hurt that I thought. It’s not some universal truth about who I am. It’s just someone’s opinion, and it says as much about that person as it does about me.”

There’s a big difference, Jiang pointed out, between remorse over not having done something, and rejection. Rejection is getting shot down and surviving; remorse is never taking flight in the first place.

He has yet to hear back on his hundredth request—an interview with President Obama—but Jiang did score a yes he never foresaw the night he received the text message that had crushed his dreams: he landed a deal to publish a book about the power of rejection.

Facing constant rejection can be devastating. But it can also be the impetus you need to work harder than you ever thought possible.

The customary sting he had experienced upon being rejected had been replaced by a feeling of liberation that he found exhilarating, pushing him to take ever-greater risks

Draw on your inner resources

Selling a cartoon to The New Yorker magazine takes a Herculean amount of diligence, dedication, stamina and grit. When Bob Mankoff first started out as a cartoonist, he submitted thousands of entries to The New Yorker before one was finally accepted for publication. Almost 30 years later, after penning some 950 New Yorker drawings, Mankoff is the cartoon editor of the magazine. He and his team laboriously sift through as many as two thousand entries a week, knowing that only 17 or 18 of them will make the cut. And many of the submissions are from regulars, talented artists who face an acceptance rate of only 10 per cent.

Yet they refuse to give up, drawing on a reservoir of creativity and wit that seems to be limitless. Mankoff believes their creativity is actually fuelled by The New Yorker’s low acceptance rate; like a gambler’s high, the artist never knows when, and which, of his drawings will be a winner. “Every so often,” Mankoff told us, “you will get that jolt of positive reinforcement to fuel your resilience.”

It is often exactly the motivation artists need to reach deeper into their creative imagination and spur their sense of grit.

Go with your guts

The hypercompetitive tech industry, with its take-no-prisoners culture, seems to breed a lot of introspection about grit. As a female engineer in the testosterone-driven Silicon Valley, senior Google manager Sabrina Farmer frequently battled self-doubt and harsh self-criticism. She realised that questioning or downplaying her capabilities had become second nature. When an acquaintance mentioned plans to run a triathlon, Farmer instantly responded, “Oh, I could never do that!” Later, she found herself wondering: Why not? What made me say that? She summoned the grit to sign up for the race, train and compete, then went on to run a marathon. It wasn’t, she confessed later, something she particularly enjoyed, but the insight it gave her was well worth the effort and agony. She realised that her habit of belittling herself served as an air cushion from failure’s hard falls. But that emotional safety mechanism was also holding her back.

Farmer attributed her tentativeness to what psychologists call “impostor syndrome.” In her book The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women, Valerie Young writes that people with impostor syndrome tend to dismiss their accomplishments and abilities “as merely a matter of luck, timing, outside help, charm—even computer error… that they’ve somehow managed to slip through the system undetected, in their mind it’s just a matter of time before they’re found out.” And it strikes successful women more than any other group. It’s what prompted actress Jodie Foster to confess on 60 Minutes that she thought her Academy Award was “a fluke” and that “everybody would find out, and they’d take the Oscar back. They’d come to my house, knocking on the door, ‘Excuse me, we meant to give that to someone else. That was going to Meryl Streep.’’’

Now, when Sabrina finds herself clinging to the safety net of self-doubt, she stops to ask herself three questions:

1. What is the problem?
2. What’s the worst that can happen?
3. Is the worst-case scenario real, or just my perspective [an emotional response]?

She then pinpoints what it would take to fix the problem at hand. If it’s a tool or skill she doesn’t have, she figures out how to obtain it. Using this approach makes taking on something unfamiliar a challenge to solve instead of a humiliating failure waiting to happen.

Linda’s favourite impostor story was of the time she almost got her bough of holly decked one Christmas when she jingled the wrong bell. A struggling actor in her mid-twenties, Linda was just getting by on a string of part-time gigs, giving piano lessons, teaching music theory at City College of New York, acting in off-off and more-off Broadway shows, etc. When the extremely wealthy head of a yogurt dynasty offered fifty dollars—more than half Linda’s rent!—to play Christmas carols at the family’s annual holiday reunion, Linda grabbed the gig. But there was a problem.

“I was a poor Jewish girl with, shall we say, a limited repertoire of lyrics that included the words ‘Jesus,’ ‘saviour,’ ‘Christ,’ or ‘Bethlehem,’” she recalls. “But I was a pretty good sight reader and I needed the 50 bucks, so I took the job, and bravely walked inside an apartment so huge it had its own zip code.”

The yogurt patriarch turned out to be a formidable man in his early 50s who clutched a baton in one hand and a scotch in the other. He demanded to know if Linda knew all of the 37 carols he placed on, the beautiful Steinway concert grand she was about to play.

“Well, not really,” Linda answered, a tad too honestly. “But I’m a quick study.”

Scrooge McYogurt turned several shades of purple, he was so angry. “He leaned over to me—I can still smell the scotch on his breath—and warned me that if I played just one wrong note, he would bodily throw me out the door.”

Linda might have succumbed to the impostor syndrome in that moment and walked out. But she was so incensed by the guy’s attitude toward her that she decided to prove her competence instead of questioning her qualifications. And her inner sense of grit served her well. She played not just well, but brilliantly. Not only did she play every note perfectly, but she began to improvise and embellish the music, dazzling the party guests with her impassioned interpretation of each tune. “By the time we got to ‘Silent Night,’ there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Family members surrounded me at the piano singing with me and asking me to stay long past my allotted time. And the best part? Scrooge McYogurt gave me an extra 50 dollars!”

And she came home with far more than a bulging pocketbook: “What I learned that evening was that even when I took the risk of going out on a limb, doing something I wasn’t really qualified to do, I was able to step up to the plate, stretch my limits, and accomplish more than I ever thought possible. Instead of feeling scared, I felt emboldened. I ended up proving to myself that, just maybe, I had underestimated my talents and abilities.”

So our advice? When in doubt, ring those bells!

Take a Leap

Robin faced down her own imposter syndrome moment when she was approached in 2013 by a recruiter seeking a CEO to run the American Legacy Foundation, one of the nation’s largest non-profit organisations. Legacy, recently renamed the Truth Initiative, was the antismoking advocacy group that had been established in 1999 as part of the $206 billion Master Settlement Agreement—the largest civil litigation in history between the major tobacco companies, 46 states, the District of Columbia, and five US territories. The recruiter needed to know within 30 days whether Robin was interested.

Accepting the job would mean dismantling every safety net Robin had. It would mean leaving the advertising industry, where she had focussed her professional efforts for her entire career. It would mean leaving a for-profit enterprise for a non-profit one. It would mean leaving her native New York, her beloved friends, and a career’s worth of business contacts for Washington, a city where she knew almost no one. Robin’s husband, Kenny, would have to quit his job as a hospital administrator and find a new position in DC. Everything in her life added up to that one thing we all set out seeking: security. “It was absolutely terrifying to think about leaving all that, to take a step off the edge and challenge myself again.”

When the Kaplan Thaler Group merged a year earlier with Publicis New York, we went from an agency of 250 people to one with 700 employees. Much as Robin welcomed the chance to lead Publicis Kaplan Thaler, she realised that after many decades working in the same business, what she really craved, as scary as it seemed, was the chance to have a “second act”, one that would bring an opportunity to learn something completely new and use her years of marketing experience to do something that would have a positive impact on people’s lives. Linda assured Robin of her heartfelt support and told her to “go for it”.

So Robin picked up the recruiter’s letter, and with the deadline a few days away, wrote a passionate response. Going from selling shampoo to saving lives seemed like an unfathomable leap. On the other hand, Legacy’s “truth” public education programme for teens was legendary. The campaign had won every major award in the ad industry and had been proven to have prevented 450,000 young people from smoking in its first four years. As she drafted her response, it became clearer and clearer to her how strongly she felt about the organisation’s crusade. She saw herself as twice victimised by the tobacco industry, first as a pack-a-day teen smoker duped by cigarette manufacturers who hid the long-term health effects from the public, and second as a marketer whose entire field was tainted by the money and muscle of Big Tobacco.

Robin knew how hard it was to quit—she had stopped smoking for two years and then relapsed, before kicking the habit for good at the age of 28. Though we had never represented tobacco at Kaplan Thaler Group, no one in advertising could escape the shoot-the-messenger backlash from consumers who felt horribly betrayed by advertising campaigns promoting smoking.

She finished writing her letter and went to bed. You know what, Robin, that’s probably the end of that, she told herself.

But it felt good to convey how the tobacco companies had made people in advertising look deceptive, manipulative and dangerous.

“Of course they’re going to hire you,” Linda predicted when Robin told her what she did. And after a couple of gruelling rounds of interviewing, Robin had indeed beaten out more than one hundred candidates and got the job.

Accepting the new position was both liberating and terrifying, all at once. Peering down into that metaphorical career canyon, Robin steeled herself by flashing back to the toughest question that had been thrown at her during the final interview with toe board of directors, when she had been asked how she would feel about running a controversial organisation whose rich and powerful foes might well decide to go against her personally. It could, she was warned, get very ugly. Her answer, immediate and straight from her native Bronx roots: “Bring it on.”

Excerpted with permission from Grit to Great by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval and published by Crown Business

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One day at a cocktail party which had many other writers attending, Isaac Asimov asked someone, “When will you be publishing your next book, Miss Coolidge?” “When,” Miss Coolidge wryly replied, “will you not be publishing your next book, Mr. Asimov?”

Asimov was an eminent scholar and one of the most published authors of the 20^th century. Although he is renowned for his great repertoire of sci-fi writings, he authored well-written books in almost all the categories of Dewey Decimal System of library classification—from religion and languages to pure sciences and even arts. He also wrote about 90,000 letters and postcards in his lifetime. He received tremendous recognition and his works won him several prestigious awards including many lifetime achievement awards.

How could he write so much so well and on so many varied subjects? What was the source of energy and ideas of this prolific writer? What was his secret? I believe what kept Asimov going right till the end of his life was his enthusiasm.

Everything that anyone has ever done well can be attributed to his or her enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a power; we can use this power to achieve whatever we imagine for ourselves. Inspirational keynote speaker and Hall of Fame broadcaster Sonny Melendrez tells you how to access this power in this month’s cover story.

Using examples from his own life and of others, he illustrates how enthusiasm takes you from dreaming about a good life to living it. “When you truly believe in what you see, your vision begins to take on a life of its own. People, resources and circumstances will begin to appear,” he says as he shares the six elements that unleash the full force of fervour. He suggests ways in which you can bring enthusiasm into your everyday life and also offers advice on how to enthuse your team members.

The story is lucid and packed with wisdom. But words only inspire; action is up to you. And unless you use the insights and put into practise the author’s suggestions, your life will not change. As 2015 comes to an end, how about stocking up on the vibrant power of enthusiasm so that when the New Year arrives, you march into it with the confidence to achieve your most cherished goals?

The post December 2015 issue: The power of enthusiasm appeared first on Complete Wellbeing.

The dreamer awakens

I am going to be careful to not make too many metaphors related to sleep, but for those of you who have spiritually awakened, it is like coming out of one kind of dreamland. The physical world around us is, in so many ways, more illusory than the dreams that we have at night. So much of the world is overrun with lies and deceptions. But in the dreamtime, you are often in a world much more real because every emotion and feeling is coming directly from you. In this way, your dreams are often where you are most vulnerable and exposed to the truth. You can’t lie to yourself in your subconscious. Going into your subconscious, you’ll see where fear, anger and self-deception dominate your life. This is often why many people have nightmares. For some people, sleep and nightmares can be really bad because there is hidden trauma that the person has forgotten. Such people are afraid even to go to sleep. After years of avoidance and keeping themselves constantly busy in their waking hours, they develop insomnia to avoid dealing with what is coming up from the subconscious.

Intense nightmares indicate that the person is dealing with a lot of fear and fear is its own trauma. Watching horror movies and other things that are based on fear further exacerbates the problem. It’s like injecting poison into your body. At night, your subconscious is trying to rid itself of that poison. During a spiritual awakening, the ridding of poisons goes on everywhere and that includes your dreams and the subconscious.

Creating a dream journal

I am no expert on the psycho-analysis of dreams, but I can say for certain that keeping a dream journal can be an illuminating tool for anyone on the spiritual path. Simply have it close to your bed and when you’ve had a dream you want to remember, write it down before you forget it [dreams fade away very quickly]. Over time, you can discover themes and similarities. Since dreams operate in emotions and imagery, these are usually the most important parts to focus on. For instance, it may not be as interesting that you picked your step-father to play a stand-up comedian in your dream so much as the feelings that come from him, whether it’s inspiration to do something new, overcoming stage-fright and other fears, or something else. As you continue to get a better sense of what your dreams are about, you may find ways in which you can take action during your waking hours to address your deeper needs that your subconscious is telling you about.

For instance, you may have always dreamt of going to exotic places or driving on the road somewhere. It may show up again and again in different forms and as you recognise this pattern in your dream journal, you can begin to inquire with yourself if you need more time to explore life. That may mean actually travelling, or it may mean picking up new hobbies and meeting new people. Dreams work in metaphors, so you may not actually need to go on a road trip. Of course, that might be a fun way to explore anyway.

Nightmares and being alone in the dark

For others, dreams have long been a scary place. A dream journal can help, but looking at how much fear is in your everyday life may be more important. Take a look at the life you’re leading and how you’re handling the stresses in your life. Pay attention to what you are afraid of. You can write down your different fears to get some perspective, or you can talk to a close friend about what frightens you. While there are also ways that forgotten childhood trauma can be arising through nightmares, most often it is the way we live our daily lives that’s truly terrifying and traumatising us. Facing these fears in our waking hours and making meaningful changes are important parts of making space for a more restful sleep.

For those with a lot of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] and other deep pains, sleep can be an exhausting place because of all the upset emotions and memories that have yet to be consciously dealt with. Finding a psychologist to help becomes one aspect of achieving a better night’s sleep. Additionally, learning how to do lucid dreaming can be another way to engage with the inner darkness. Through techniques that are available, we can learn to be semi-awake in the dream. We can take more control and interact with the difficult emotions that are arising, to understand them in order to release them. In this way, nightmares can be transformed into an empowered situation and ultimately, they can gradually be released, allowing for a more restful sleep.

The dream that is too real

Have you ever had a dream that seemed like it was actually happening? Many people do. This can only be felt and while it isn’t something that I’ve really felt too often, I certainly know others who have had these types of dreams. However, these aren’t dreams. Most of the time, these are believed to be out-of-body experiences, which some call astral projection. For some people, the veil between this world and other dimensions is very thin. At night, their spirit simply steps out from underneath this veil. This can be a way to explore this world or other worlds. It can be a way to heal on the level of the soul and sometimes this is a way to heal directly with other people where healing isn’t possible in the waking world. For instance, the person has already passed, or the other person is violent or otherwise irreconcilable in his/her waking self. But their true self is a being of light. No matter how horrible they are in person, that soul can be approached on the energetic level for healing.

Certainly, you can become more conscious of these travels, but this is quite different than how we use our consciousness in waking life. In this space, you don’t feel asleep. You’re very alert and you can suddenly find yourself looking at your body in bed or moving into space. In this place, you can communicate easily and directly with other spirits. If you’ve had a loved one pass beyond and you still haven’t finished grieving, you may be able to contact them and say the good-byes that you could never do in waking life. This type of spiritual-level connection is deep and profound and, usually, doesn’t require words for communication. For some people it can be overwhelming. But the level of healing and expanding of consciousness that is possible is tremendous.

Letting go of fear

For all of these situations—regular dreams, nightmares and spirit-travel—releasing fear is essential. The more you release fear, the more you can learn from your dreams. The more you release fear, the less often nightmares will arise. And for travelling in the spirit realm, you will have a chance to see and experience amazing things that you might never have “dreamed” were possible to experience. As always, it looks easier to ask someone to “release fear” than to actually do it, but unless you begin the practice of releasing fear, you will live under its shadow forever.

So my quick tips on the topic always start with writing down what you’re afraid of. Pick an easy one and do it. In this way, you move into the fear. If you’re afraid of approaching that attractive man or woman at the coffee shop, go say, “Hello.” It doesn’t have to be a super big fear and oftentimes, large fears are built up of little ones. Chipping away at them over time helps to dissolve them.

And here’s an essential piece of the spiritual path; you move into discomfort, not away from it. Avoidance perpetuates pain. Unaddressed pain grows exponentially over time. But when you meet whatever it is that is upsetting you, then you can properly address it. Also, go slowly. Building patience is important and sitting in meditation with what frightens you is another way to prepare you to do something that scares you. Befriend your fear. It has been here the whole time, so it’s not like your fear is a new guest anyway.

Sleeping peacefully

My last few thoughts are that as we find more peace in our waking lives, we will find more peace in our sleeping time. A spiritual awakening is a special transition, where everything is particularly tumultuous, including sleep. That’s why meditation and regular spiritual practices become so essential. It helps to acknowledge and release fear on multiple levels so that you can make space for the peace and love that you already are. As you melt more deeply into that peace and love, the dreams that come may become clearer or even prophetic. This is the gift of the spiritual path. Letting go of all these burdens clears the way for you to dream the dream that matters most and then to bring that dream in your waking life.

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